Father sniffed. “Tala! You’re a miracle!” He lapped at the water. “You are your mother’s hatchling, no doubt about it,” he said on the second trip.
“This is doing me wonders,” on the third. All the gorging and retching were exhausting, but she pressed on.
As she filled her stomach a fourth time, she felt a little woozy; the climbs up and down the rock were trying. She needed a meal. Would fish live in water this rough?
It turned out they did. They liked to wait behind the bigger rocks, sitting in the calm, waiting for a meal to be swept to them by the current. But they scattered when she dived in after them and disappeared into the bubbling water.
She thought it over and tried steering herself through the current.
This was far trickier, but with a little practice, she found she could shoot into the calm waters with water-lids lowered and snap down a fish quick as thinking.
But if her stomach was digesting fish, it wasn’t helping Father. He had blood and scale to make up. The juicy fish would help. Weren’t they shiny little bags of water, after all?
She dived into the river upstream, and after a wild ride round the reversal at the knob—and a bloodied nose on an unexpected rock—she had five fish in her belly. She took her time climbing the steps.
Father was asleep. Was his breathing less labored? Hard to tell. Wistala decided against waking him for a meal; the fish just felt too good in her gorge. Besides, they’d give her strength for more fishing. When Father woke, she’d try a few trips with a belly full of fish.
Two days—and a countless number of trips with fish swallowed whole—later, Father wasn’t his old self, but he could reach the river on his own in order to drink and wash the clotted moss from his wounds.
They’d extracted the oversized spear—Father called it a highpoon and told her dwarven war machines fired it to weigh down a dragon and bring him to earth. At one point, he’d had two in him and was plunging toward the lake around the dwarves’ battlements, when luckily the second tore free and he could just fly with the other. . . .
“They got me on that great bridge between those towers of rock,” Father said as he spat gobs of fire onto the chain links, which Wistala pounded with an edged rock under Father’s instruction, feeling that her shoulders would give way long before the chain. “There are caverns big enough for a dragon to get in at them, but they had the war machines concealed in decorative galleries, all woodwork and flower beds and curtains. I was hit before I heard the roar of the chains. Clever blighters.”
Finally the links gave way, and Father drew the highpoon out his other side, where it projected from his scale—the barbs on it made any other kind of extraction impossible.
Wistala almost swooned during the gory extraction. How did Father manage the pain?
Flying was beyond him, of course. He crept ever so slowly down the knob, shuffling his sii and saa and keeping grip with three while one explored the next step. Wistala fretted as he moved—this was almost as bad as seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood. An honorable death after battle had a twilight dignity to it. Seeing her strong, confident father, lord of her home cave, reduced to a slug’s pace down the gentlest slope of this rock pile brought new anguish.
The trip back up took all afternoon, it seemed.
“I never knew there could be such a fight,” he said as the sun set behind fire-edged clouds.
The old condor still waited above, looking a little droopy. Wistala wondered if he was molting at the thought of his feast living on day after day. She liked his companionship, though, and brought him a whole dead fish she found washed up on the riverside.
The condor didn’t mind the ants.
“The Wheel of Fire?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Mother and Auron.”
Father bowed his head, nostrils shut. “I saw her. What happened to Auron?”
Wistala told him. The shouted warning . . . the elves chasing him . . . the story came slowly. She tried to give him mind-pictures but had to fill in the fuzzier parts with words.
“And here I thought he took after the grandsire on his mother’s side. That sounds like something my father would have done. And you, scales so thin they hardly keep out the raindrops, went on alone?”
“Yes.”
“You might have done better to have found a nook in the home cave and waited another year until you had your flame. A mouthful like you would be easy pickings for wolves, leave alone the hominids. But perhaps the wolves have been driven from these woods, too.”
“I wanted to find you. We’re all that’s left.” She didn’t— couldn’t—mention the copper and his betrayal. Father had grief enough.
“Perhaps,” Father said. “Some pair. A hatchling and a half-dead dragon. The hunt’s probably on already, you know.”
“In this wild country?”